even though I agree with Paloth about the Joint editor in P5 being superior you should know that there were some subtle changes to the joints in P6 so I would highly recommend getting at least that, nothing earth shattering, but joint falloffs are ever so slightly smoother in P6 and 7 over P5. so I tend to rig in P5 but do my final adjustments in P7.

Quote - It all comes from how the skirt needs to be grouped in order for it to pick up the leg bends. The hip group has a column of polygons that runs straight down the middle of the skirt, to the ground, Same with left and right thigh. It works okay on non extreme bends (usually under 30°), but it's abilities are exceeded in bends closer to 90° .
Just the limitation of Poser's rigging system.

There's a fair amount of this explained in 'secrets of figure creation for Poser 5' book, by B.L. Render.

Yep I know, but sometimes there are breakthroughs, new ways of doing things that no one else ever thought of. Skirts are a particular Dog as far as conforming goes, so I am always looking for a trick that will give me the oppertunity to offer better conforming skirts then with my current method of using ghost parts, and I have yet to find one that doesn't have it's own drawbacks. I know I can offer dynamic skirts but the tradeoff is that you loose a lot of the sculpting you can do with conformers in Dynamics, and there are still a lot of people who's machines just can't handle dynamics quickly enough to be usable.

Quote - hehehehe - seems like there's definatly some action happening in the center of the figure ... I found much of that activity was caused by the thigh bend, not the shins? Intriguing...

yeah its the two falloff zones both acting on the same vertexes, I have never found a way around that issue with poser rigging, was curious to see if she had.

Interesting :) can you do a sitting pose?

actually the jcm in the clothing does have to be slaved to the base figure to work, as poser doesnt actually keep track of the clothing joint rotation when it is conformed, its considered slave to the base figure. unfortunately Indoda you have discovered one of the "Features" of poser where it rewrites the numbers whether you want them or not. the figure 1 part is fine but you need to delete the :1 after the node that the dial is in in this case your rForeArm, so you want to do that hand editing and then not resave the cr2 in poser.

Quote - Oh, I notice that Poser 7 importing isn't supported.  It will only import up to Poser 6.

That's only for transposer.

you dont need transposer, you can import poser content directly into Carrara 3D express just like in poser fully rigged and ready to pose and animate.

I think P5y is talking about the difficulty that open gl has with rendering multiple transmapped layers. generally the transmapped layers underneath will dissapear. unfortunately that is a situation with open gl, it happens in studio as well though not quite as noticably as in poser.

any time you save a scene in Studio it saves out all the meshes in studio format in the data folder. In order for those scenes to reload they need those files. the data is seperated out into 3 seperate elements, the base mesh, each morph, and the uv info. the uv.dsv files are that uv info and are needed for those files.

while those are really complex boots as you say, I have a couple of suggestions on how to reduce polycount, first off a lot of that detail could be done with displacement such as the seams, creases, and even the rounded silver parts. getting rid of that detail alone could bring down your polycount by a third. also before exporting lower your smoothing rate in hexagon down to the minimum you can without causing too much roughness, remember that Poser tends to smooth far more then your modeler will show so you can get away with some roughness in the mesh. remember for each number higher the smoothing is set you are multipying the polycount by 4

frankly I don't think its possible to do what you want with a conformer, the problem is that there is no way for a skirt to conform properly to all the parts of both legs and keep it as one bodypart without splitting. do you have a link to the ones you are talking about? I am curious to see them, and see how they do it.

Is it just the boots that are that high, or is it the whole outfit? I would say 49 thousand polys is way too heavy for a single clothing item, I could see a whole outfit going that high if it's very complex though.

the trick to naming a bone in Poser 5 is to hit enter key after typing in the name each time. I tend to use the setup room as little as possible, the only times I use the setup room is if I want to create figures that contain the joints of one figure but have added joints, like if I am doing bodyhandles in clothing, for that the setup room is generally very useful, otherwise I avoid it. as for the joint editor I prefer the P5 joint editor to both the P6 and P7 ones, as they are both more buggy. unfortunately due to the slight changes in how joints work in poser starting with P6 I have been forced to move up.